Phylo – A Human Computing Framework for Comparative Genomics

Phylo – A Human Computing Framework for Comparative Genomics is an interactive game that lets you contribute to science. I’ve been playing with that for a while.

The Problem:

Genetic sequences are difficult to understand and so to decipher their structure, we need to compare them to detect any similar regions they may have. Similar regions may indicate important elements of our genetic code. We have several genomes to align and we call this the multiple alignment problem.

The Game:

We abstract the multiple alignment problem to a game where the goal will be to align words made by pieces of different color instead of letters representing the genetic code (A,C,G,T).